By Jaime Welch-Donahue

Close to 200 well-wishers gathered in the new Wolf Law Library on the evening of June 1 to celebrate two champions of Legal Aid in Virginia – Chancellor Professor of Law, Emeritus, John Levy and Congressman Bobby Scott. The event was presented by the Legal Aid Society of Eastern Virginia (LASEV) and co-sponsored by Alvin Anderson ’72, H. Duncan Garnett ’71, and Raymond H. Suttle, Jr. ’88.

One of the library’s spacious reading rooms had been transformed into an elegant reception space for the event, though construction activities were still in evidence for the new facility.  The Wolf Law Library is on schedule to be completed in mid-July. In his opening remarks, Dean Taylor Reveley expressed the Law School’s pride in hosting the occasion and jokingly told attendees “it is good to see that no one tripped over construction materials on the way in.”

The evening celebrated Levy’s and Scott’s roles in founding the Peninsula Legal Aid Center thirty years ago and also underscored the need for private financial support to make Legal Aid more widely available to those in need.

College President Gene R. Nichol offered the keynote address and spoke warmly about the “heroes” of the evening.  

Nichol, who taught with Levy on the Law School faculty in the 1980s, teased Levy that, looking back on those years, his hair “looks exactly the same. I don’t know if it was prematurely gray,” he said. “I could never tell if John was 27 or 59 so great was his wisdom.”

He characterized his former colleague as a “quiet, inspiring, selfless” person, “swimming, too, when you think about it, against much broader tides.”

The work closest to Levy’s heart has been “the teaching of skills, the imparting of values to young lawyers which they would then make real for those having the most difficult time of it,” he said. “There are great ways of living well in the law and this man has mastered them better than anyone I know.”

Congressman Scott, he observed, had earned the admiration of his peers in politics as “a bastion for those left powerless, those who had no voice, those ‘from whom we had generally turned our gaze away.’ Bobby Scott was there, time after time, for those who otherwise would have no voice.”

Nichol added that he was heartened by the decades-long connection between the Law School and Legal Aid. This connection, he said, “serves a great goal in an obvious way, giving law students opportunities and responsibilities. There is a more important part of it as well. The Law School’s work and Legal Aid’s work pushes back against the greatest shortcoming of the American legal system and that is that we are willing to leave out so many from the effective use of the civil justice system, leaving them out in a way that demeans the American commitment to equal protection under the law.”

Larry Martin, a former member of the LASEV Board of Directors and chair of LASEV’s Peninsula Campaign, and Collie Owens, current Board chairman, read proclamations from the cities of Newport News and Williamsburg. The cities respectively saluted Scott and Levy “for their lifetime commitment to insuring legal services to the citizens of the Peninsula and beyond” and commended them “for their lifetime work on behalf of all the citizens of Eastern Virginia.”

Tricia Batson, a managing attorney at LASEV’s Hampton office, presented gifts to the pair to thank them for their years of dedication. Levy, an avid kayaker, received an engraved paddle, and Scott, an autographed copy of The Measure of a Man by Sidney Poitier.

In their remarks, Alvin Anderson ’72 harkened back to the naissance of legal services for the Peninsula in the 1970s and H. Duncan Garnett ’71 resounded a hard reality heard throughout the evening: that eighty percent of those who qualify for legal aid do not receive it due to lack of staff.

The reception was part of LASEVs first-ever fundraising campaign, which seeks to raise $100,000 to hire two new attorneys. Garnett stressed the importance of raising these funds and also reminded the audience of the ongoing challenge -- to raise people's awareness of the importance of legal aid, "how this service separates us from other countries, other legal systems."

“I look forward,” he said, “to making Legal Aid a part of everyday life in our community.”

LASEVs year-long Anniversary Campaign will culminate with an awards ceremony and dinner on October 12, 2007.